The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

When they failed to reach Casa Magni that night Mary Shelley knew that fate had taken her poet from her. She broke out in wild despair, and engaged a vessel early the next morning to take her to Leghorn. There she found Hunt and Byron, but no Williams or Shelley. Byron went energetically to work and had the coast searched for mile after mile. It was not till after eight days that they found the body of Williams, lying bloated and almost unrecognizable on the sands; and not for another two days did they find Shelley—all that remained of him, the flesh torn away from his bones by vultures, the face gone beyond recognition; they knew him only from the Sophocles in one pocket and the Keats in another.

The law of Tuscany required that bodies thrown up by the sea must be burnt to avoid pestilence. So Byron and Hunt and Trelawney built a pyre, and when the body was half consumed, Trelawney snatched the heart out of the flames. The widow had the heart buried near Keats in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, under a slab bearing the simple words, Cor cordium—“heart of hearts.” When she died, twenty-nine years later, it was found that her copy of Adonais contained (in a silken covering) the ashes of her dead lover, at that page which speaks of immortality, and the hope that springs forever in defeated men.

10. WALT WHITMAN

Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia;

Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts,

That matter of Troy, and Achilles’ wrath, and

Aeneas’, Odysseus’wanderings;

Placard “Removed” and “To let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus;

Repeat at Jerusalem-place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate, and on Mount Moriah;

The same on the walls of your Gothic European Cathedrals, and German, French, and Spanish castles;

For know a better, fresher, busier sphere—a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you….

I heard that you asked for something to prove this puzzle, the New World,

And to define America, her athletic Democracy;

Therefore I send you my poems, that you behold in them what you wanted.

It was a great revolution in the history of literature when a man appeared who saw the elements of poetry, the scenes of the human drama, in the very life about him; who found a way to put into song the spirit of the pioneer, and who saw that there was more poetry out under the stars than in all the salons of an unnatural life. Almost for the first time a poet was to find themes worthy of noble verse in the lives of common men; he would lift the people up into literature and be a Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man in poetry; he would incarnate not some dead ideal of Arthur or some forgotten myth of forgotten gods, but his own rough country, his own dubious democracy, his own turbulent and growing time. What Homer had been to Greece,Virgil to Rome, Dante to Italy, Shakespeare to England, he was to be for America, because he dared to see in her, with all her faults, her material of song. He made for her new life a new form of verse, as loose and irregular, as flowing and strong as himself. And so truly did he see and sing that at last he became not only the poet of democracy and America, but, by the greatness of his soul and the universality of his vision, the poet of the modern world.